Data Center Location Strategy

What many developers call data center site selection, we call location strategy and site development, because it involves so much more than selecting a site. We don’t just screen and tour the available sites in the market. We assess market conditions, gather data points from our customers, and develop a list of Critical Location Factors. We then work with various stakeholders in a region or utility territory to identify a long list of on- and off-market properties. We rigorously vet sites and down-select using a data-driven approach, ensuring that we find properties with the strongest fundamentals.

For Stream, data center location strategy it is a competitive advantage as it drives our ability to develop new data center capacity for our customers on time and without any surprises. It also de-risks our land banking strategy by ensuring shovel-ready sites.

One component of our data center location strategy is our proprietary Geographic Information System (GIS) platform. The platform analyzes and displays pertinent information about potential sites in any given market. It is a highly scalable tool that allows us to analyze all potential properties in a market, better arming our team of experts to make data-driven decisions and enabling them to focus on final stage due diligence and working directly with stakeholders to develop sites.

Our GIS platform also enables us to identify and capture the best opportunities and shorten the longest parts of the development process. For example, where the typical developer might go into a meeting with the power utility and ask where the utility has capacity (a question for which it is almost impossible to get a straight answer) we were able to discern based on our maps of the power grid which sites were most likely to have power capacity. We went into our meeting with the power utility and told them where we believed they had capacity, and they were able to confirm our assumptions.

Augmenting local stakeholders’ insights about table stakes factors with our team’s expert insights on the more complex nuanced factors, leveraging GIS data, and being systematic and strategic enables Stream to ensure that we have a full picture of the value opportunities and risks in a given market—so that we can identify the properties that are lowest risk, cost-optimized, and fastest to develop.

Explore more about data center location strategy and site development.